I decided that the only books that I refer back to or re-read often enough to justify keeping them are:

-poetry books-dictionaries and other reference books-instructional books-collections of short stories-books I have yet to read-cookbooks

I love reading poetry although I don't do it all that often. I sometimes get really into it and read nothing but poetry for hours at a time, but not much aside from that. I recently discovered two poets whose work I like a lot: Sharon Olds and Lawrence Ferlinghetti. Olds' poems are simple and easy to understand but she describes things beautifully. Ferlinghetti's are both serious and playful in a likable, non-gimmicky way. I like Yusef Komunyakaa a lot too but that's nothing new.

"At the Screen Door" by Yusef Komunyakaa

Just before sunlightBurns off morning fog.Is it her, while she knowWhat I've seen & done,How my boots leave little grave-stoneShapes in the wet dirt,That I'm no longer lightOn my feet, there's a rockIn my belly? It weighsAs much as the storyPaul told me, moving aheadLike it knows my heart.Is this the same storyThat sent him to a padded cell?After all the men he'd killed in Korea& on his first tour in Vietnam,Someone tracked him down.The Spec 4 he orderedInto a tunnel in Cu ChiNow waited for him behindThe screen door, a sunsetIn his eyes, a dead manWearing his teenage son's face.The scream that leapedOut of Paul's mouthWasn't his, not this decoratedHero. The figure standing thereWasn't his son. Who is itWaiting for me, a tall shadowUnlit in the doorway, no moreThan an outline of the past?I drop the duffel bag& run before I know it,Running toward her, the only oneI couldn't have surprised,Who'd be here at daybreakWatching a new day stumbleThrough a whiplash of grassLike a man drunk on the rageOf being alive.

I stood on the porch tonight--which way do weface to talk to the dead? I thought of thenew rose, and went out over thegrey lawn--things reallyhave no color at night. I descendedthe stone steps, as if to the place where onespeaks to the dead. The rose stoodhalf-uncurled, glowing white in theblack air. Later I rememberedyour birthday. You would have been ninety and gettingroses from me. Are the dead thereif we do not speak to them? When I came to see youyou were always sitting quietly in the chair,not knitting, because of the arthritis,not reading, because of the blindness,just sitting. I never knew how youdid it or what you were thinking. Now Isometimes sit on the porch, waiting,trying to feel you there like the color of theflowers in the dark.

"The End" by Sharon Olds

We decided to have the abortion, becamekillers together. The period that camechanged nothing. They were dead, that young couplewho had been for life.As we talked of it in bed, the crashwas not a surprise. We went to the window,looked at the crushed cars and the gleamingcurved shears of glass as if we haddone it. Cops pulled the bodies outbloody as births from the small, smokingaperture of the door, laid themon the hill, covered them with blankets that soakedthrough. Bloodbegan to pourdown my legs into my slippers. I stoodwhere I was until they shot the boundform into the black holeof the ambulance and stood the other oneup, a bandage covering its head,stained where the eyes had been.The next morning I had to kneelan hour on that floor, to clean up my blood,rubbing with wet cloths at those darktranslucent spots, as one has to soaka long time to deglaze the panwhen the feast is over.